Anyone know the background on hanging an egg from the main chandelier of a church building?

I have seen it done overseas but can not recall seeing it ever done here in the US. Does anyone know where you can get these eggs? Are the up all year long or just during the Pascha season? Any information or observations on this tradition would be helpful.

Anyone know the background on hanging an egg from the main chandelier of a church building?

I have seen it done overseas but can not recall seeing it ever done here in the US. Does anyone know where you can get these eggs? Are the up all year long or just during the Pascha season? Any information or observations on this tradition would be helpful.

In close to 50 years of being Orthodox, and with a foot in both Russian and Greek traditions, I've never seen it.

I've seen ostrich eggs adorning the pointy ends of crosses in Ethiopian churches (in pictures at least), but no eggs hanging from chandaliers. That's probably because I'm Antiochian. You know, in Antioch, we use hand grenades. They're not live ones, but symbolic represnations of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, which travels with the patriarch wherever he goes.

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I know I've seen pictures of it in old Armenian churches overseas. Here in the US, I think I've seen it at St. Antony Coptic Orthodox Monastery. Maybe someone else who has been to the Monastery can confirm if my recollections are correct.

I can confirm that is has been a tradition since at least the 15th century. Piero della Francesca, a renaissance painter, features a hanging ostrich egg in his Brera Madonna. Our professor specifically said that the painter discovered this tradition through his contact with Byzantines who fled to Italy after the fall of Constantinople.

Now that I looked this up on Wikipedia, I see that the article contains a bunch of unlikely unsourced speculations.

I was at a Coptic church yesterday, where they had an ostrich egg hanging from the top of the iconostasis. I took a picture of it with my phone, but I don't know how to get it from my phone to here. I'm so technology impaired.

I was at a Coptic church yesterday, where they had an ostrich egg hanging from the top of the iconostasis. I took a picture of it with my phone, but I don't know how to get it from my phone to here. I'm so technology impaired.

We have three. You can see them in the picture at the top of the webpage: www.smcoc.ca

I've always been told that the belief was that the ostrich hatched her egg by looking at it rather than sitting on it, and that if she looked away it would not hatch, so it is a symbol of Christ's constant care for us, and a reminder to pay attention during the Liturgy.